


everything i hold dear

by casualbird



Category: Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood & Manga
Genre: Angst and Fluff and Smut, Blind Character, Body Worship, Coming Untouched, F/M, First Time, Getting Together, Light Dom/sub, Oral Sex, Post-Canon, femdom bayBEE, the yearning, valid het
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-13
Updated: 2020-08-13
Packaged: 2021-03-06 02:21:15
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,868
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25885753
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/casualbird/pseuds/casualbird
Summary: A million things flicker through him, an overwhelm of sensation--the heat of her, the washed-out fabric of her housecoat, the juxtaposition of well-kept skin and gnarled scar. How he never wants to stop feeling it. What he wants to do to her--or with her, or for her.After everything, Riza and Roy carry on looking after each other.
Relationships: Riza Hawkeye/Roy Mustang
Comments: 28
Kudos: 106





	everything i hold dear

He never wanted her to babysit him, never wanted her to see him fumbling, groping in the dark, bashing knees on the coffee table she hasn’t moved in years.

As such, she hasn’t. She changes his bandages, yes, guides him through her cramped apartment with one hand light on his shoulder. Picks his clothes for him, but she’d always had a better eye for that anyway. It feels--if not natural, like the first time walking on new-fused bones. It isn’t wrong.

He’s grateful. He tells her one night, halting, swirling the dregs of their last cup of coffee. Like he’s a boy, again, the one he was when he met her. When he was impetuous, would have done anything to crook up the placid corners of her mouth.

He loves her.

He tells her that, too.

Any veneer he’s ever slicked over himself crooning to _Elizabeth_ was gone, burned away, and his voice was brittle on the words _my queen._

This, too, she took in her capable stride, and Roy didn’t need his eyes to know the fondness on her face.

That was three nights ago. Since, there’s been little talk of it, barely anything at all--it’s the simplest thing, for them to finally slot into place. Riza leads him through the hallways by the hand, and in the evenings they sit on her settee, under the same old threadbare afghan, and her voice is soft when she reads to him from the newspaper.

He sleeps in her bed, once, with her knee crooked around his waist. Her breath warms the bare nape of his neck, and his heartbeat falls in line with hers, steady and vital.

The next day is their last. Havoc’s train arrives the following afternoon, and with the stone it will be a matter of moments for each of them. Roy’s eyes will ache against the light, and he will bury his hands deep in the pockets of his trench coat, and he will shuffle home.

Dust will have settled thick on the tabletops. The contents of his icebox, sparse as they are, will be a rancid wreck. He will hear the neighbors crossing swords again, couples that forget their solidarity.

He doesn’t have the words to say _I don’t want to go._ Or, he does, but they catch in his throat like burrs--he has imposed enough already. He has stepped across the line they drew together, without ever speaking of it. It’s not the point, how readily she followed--when the rubble clears away, when humdrum bureaucracy gets back to its feet, things will be difficult for them.

But his Riza always makes a point of _knowing,_ and she’s not about to let her perfect record lapse. She holds his scarred hand in her two, lays them in her lap. Nestles closer, so they’re sealed from hip to knee.

“I suppose a person might say ‘I wish we’d done this sooner,’” she says, her voice gentle, enfolding like fresh bandages. “But I’ve got better things to fret about.”

Roy nods, huffing a little laugh. He doesn’t have to tell her that he knows exactly what she means.

Her fingers tighten, briefly, around his. “Roy… We’ll figure something out.”

She must be able to feel the way his name on her voice makes him shiver. She strokes the hills and valleys of his knuckles, leans to let his head rest in the crook of her neck.

They sit like this, until their radio show is over. They were only half-listening anyway, for an excuse not to go to bed. Not as if they really need one--they only keep sitting there, through the gentle midnight static, cataloguing each other’s every twitch, every contented shaking little breath.

_I don’t want to go,_ Roy thinks, and tells her so in the sweat on his palm, the way his breath twitches when he leans to nuzzle her cheek.

“A gentleman,” she murmurs, dryly. Roy laughs, and has nearly sussed out his reply when she kisses him, untangling their fingers so she can grasp the point of his jaw, draw him closer. She tastes like the afterthoughts of coffee--a vague, bitter tang that wild horses could not convince Roy to be bothered by.

He’s no idea what to say, when she pulls back, her callused fingers brushing gentle over his unshaven skin. Not _Lieutenant,_ anything but _Lieutenant,_ so he doesn’t speak at all. Just huffs, raspy at the back of his tight throat. It’s the kind of sound she’s heard him make before, when he watches her empty a clip into the very center of a target, when she gives some bastard her chilly, elegant what for. _What would I do without you,_ it says, and she doesn’t have an answer, because she doesn’t need one.

She is with him, and he is with her, and Roy’s barely through a nod when she’s humming sweetly, kissing him again.

She is fierce, the way she presses him back into the couch. Fierce, but not warlike. Fiery, but in the manner of a hearth--sustaining, enfolding, vital. Roy shivers.

Riza’s free arm surges up over his shoulder, steady fingers clasping the blanket draped across his back. The fingers on Roy’s neck slip away, tracing down pilled flannel sleeves to find his hand again, to clutch it tight.

He follows her up, a steady, fluid motion, until his fingertips brush the apple of her cheek.

“Go on,” she murmurs, her slick lips brushing his, and Roy nearly doesn’t parse her words for the feel, the nearness of her.

But he does--strokes the backs of fingers gently over her cheekbone, traces the streamlined edge of her jaw. She’s let her hair down, he finds, and the flyaways brush silken over his trembling hand.

It’s just as soft, as fine as he’d always thought it’d be. She laughs--he must have frozen, and who knows for how long.

Neither the flutter of her breath in his mouth or her gentle-curving smile do a _thing_ to help Roy’s composure.

His fingers gravitate to her scalp, across the familiar severity of her browbone, and when he draws them through her hair, he doesn’t hit a single snarl.

Riza tips her head back, raises that hand to the nape of Roy’s neck. He needs a trim--what are meant to be clean lines have gotten scruffy, but caring about that would be beneath her.

He thinks perhaps she’ll say something--soft, apt, piercing. She doesn’t.

Her hand slips over Roy’s again, guides it slowly, minutely down. Arranges it in a curve about her neck, so that her new-made scar runs the length of his palm, and--

_“Oh,”_ Roy sighs, all of a sudden winded. He strokes the jagged line of it, as gingerly as he’s ever handled anything, and his breath leaves him completely when his fingertip crosses her artery, thrumming on and on and on.

Roy hears himself whimper.

A million things flicker through him, an overwhelm of sensation--the heat of her, the washed-out fabric of her housecoat, the juxtaposition of well-kept skin and gnarled scar. How he never wants to stop feeling it. What he wants to do to her--or with her, or for her.

_For her,_ he thinks, sounds best.

“Should we go to bed?” she asks, as close to crooning as ever he’s heard her. “If it isn’t too presumptuous of me.”

Roy laughs, because he knows she knows it isn’t. Because she’s good enough to say so anyway, because he loves her.

Because, no, he _doesn’t_ want to go to bed. He lists into her, bumps up soft against her forehead. Grumbles “‘s too far to walk.”

“Making up for lost time?” Her voice stumbles on it, trembling with the slow sweep of his fingertips over sensitive thin skin.

“I just think you deserve to, uh. To not have to walk me down the hall, first.”

She ruffles his hair, with a vigor and a fondness that suggests she’s been wanting to for _years._ “I wouldn’t mind.”

He kisses her, slowly, just left of center on her lips. It’s not a _surprise,_ that she’s said this--if he thinks about it, it is the most certain thing in the world.

Roy sighs to himself, and strokes her neck, and resolves to find a way to marry her forthwith.

But that’s losing the plot, just a little bit. The cart before the horse, as it were--he lays another kiss at the corner of her mouth, turns to hold her cheek to cheek. The matter needs sorting out, and Riza does so love efficient business.

“I--” and he nearly stops himself, because it sounds like the type of thing he’d say while trying to bolster his rakish façade. Heaven help him, though, he means it, and he’s utterly sincere when he mumbles “I can kneel just as well on the floor.”

He’s always known that he’s chosen to love the most gracious woman in the world, but never more so than now, when she doesn’t shake her head, doesn’t say something blase about what a _line_ it is. She just laughs, a tiny, private little thing, irrepressibly fond. Roy doesn’t need to see to parse the expression on her face, a frisson of something tender and not quite exasperated. He’s seen it enough times from across his desk.

What’s new, though, is the way she kisses him--soft, nosing at the space below his ear. It’s devastating. He wants to grovel at her feet and it’s a heady thing, knowing that _he’ll probably get to._

And then she’s shifting away, her movements as precise and smooth as they would be any other time. The afghan slips from his shoulders, and seconds later she’s pressing it into his hands, folded into a neat square.

“It’s a hardwood floor,” she murmurs, by way of explanation.

“I love you,” says Roy, already sliding off the couch. She assists him, even though she doesn’t strictly _need_ to, and whispers that she knows.

It’s a little bit of situating after that--getting the blanket on the floor, getting comfortable. (It’s clever of her, he’ll have to say so later.) Finding her just-parted knees, forming his palms to them, shifting between. Roy lays down a kiss, catches the eyelet trim of her nightgown. He curls his shaking fingers in it, and it’s only partially a question. _Ready?_ yes, but also just to feel it, the delicacy of it--it’s so different from her uniform, her tactical gear, and it just…

It means she’s _safe,_ that she’s at rest, that for the moment, all is well.

She must feel him quivering, feel his pulse quicken under her hand as she lays it on the back of his neck.

Roy leans in, drags his mouth across the shield of her kneecap. He remembers distantly that he hasn’t shaven, hopes he doesn’t scrape her.

Less distantly, he remembers that he’s never done this before, that his experience in these matters is all a convenient facade, that ambition and fraternization law and the fact that the only bar Roy frequents is his mother’s have… put a damper on things.

It strikes him that he should let her know.

It strikes him that this is the worst idea he’s ever had. Not because she’ll laugh, but because she must know already--it comes through in the careful combing of her fingertips through fine hair, the soothing whispers spilling from her mouth.

Moreover, that would mean slowing down, would mean pulling back from the hazy warm confines of her skirt, her taut thighs, and really, some things are just unthinkable.

Roy doesn’t slow down.

He mumbles her name into her thigh, nuzzling up under her skirt. _Riza—_ she sighs with it, callused fingers ruffling his hair. It makes him hum, makes him whisper something she can’t catch, and if his voice has ever been gravel, she has tumbled it into riverbed silt, soft in the scoop of her palm.

She shifts her legs apart, a little, and he dives headlong for the plane of her thigh, unmarred and plush under his lips. Nudges forward, lets instinct tell him to close his lips around the widest, softest point, suckle until a mark rises on pale skin, until she’ll feel it with every step she takes tomorrow.

There’s nothing he can call the sound she makes but a _purr,_ long and low and utterly contented. The callused pads of her fingers rasp soft on the nape of his neck, and she murmurs to him, _yes, there you are._

He makes a sound as if she’s the one between his thighs, and presses on, until his forehead presses at her belly, his nose brushes the fabric of her underthings. Cotton, he thinks, plain and sensible, and he shakes his head a little, to think of all the times he’s lingered on racy lace in department store catalogs.

“Go on,” she coaxes, “if you like.”

Roy jolts, mutters something that tries to be _yes please_ and _Riza_ and _if?_ all in a rush. She twitches, at the jerk of his head, the brush of his lips.

His hands skitter, shake, fumble; but in seconds her underwear is off, half-folded, passed up into her gentle, waiting hand. He half-wishes he could see her, just catch her eye for a second, but really.

He’s seen her soft half-smile before, the even tenderness in her eyes. He’ll see it again.

What he hasn’t done is this, and he leaps for it, noses at the juncture of her thighs. Roy hasn’t really got the presence of mind to truly parse the scent of her, but it feels right--round-edged, earthy.

He feels her out with the flat of his tongue, laving over slick delicate skin, shuddering to hear her sigh. Her fingers curl against his scalp, just lightly, and he thinks he’d burn the whole world down just to feel her like this, hear the muffled hitching of her breath.

And he doesn’t even _need to._ The time for that is _past,_ and now all that’s left to do is build it all back up. Less, even--the only place he needs to be is here, his palms forming to her hips, drawing her closer and closer and closer.

Roy mouths at her, something like a kiss only warmer, slower. The taste spreads over his tongue, stays there. This is the way it’s meant to be.

If he’s not utterly screwing it up, he thinks, but the insecurity’s short-lived. Her muscles clench about his ears, drowning out her breath, the little gasps and whines he never thought he’d hear her make. Instead, there is nothing but the soft-slick sounds of his own work, his own irregular panting breaths. The rush of her arteries, like whitewater, something that could tear his feet from under him, spirit him away.

He registers a sharp ache, twitching somewhere far away, and forgets it in the next second. It just makes the strokes of his tongue more urgent, jerks one hand from under her skirt to clasp at hers, covering the back of his neck. She twines their fingers again, squeezes, and Roy swears he hears his name.

A juddering, wracking sensation, as much solace as suddenness--he’s spent himself, but it’s as peripheral as the price of tea in Xing. He turns full-tilt back to his task, as if he’s somewhere outside the need to breathe, to do anything but see this through, to make her unravel the way she has for him.

It doesn’t seem quite congruous, that someone like her could fall apart like that. It doesn’t matter--it’s a headrush to get her anywhere close, to feel the clench of corded thighs, sure fingers, to lap up everything she gives him. To hear her stilted breath, stacatto words, perfect even though he parses none of it.

Her fingers curl tighter between his, her calves bracketing his chest. She’s precious, he thinks, half-sobbing, and he’s hers, he’s hers, he’s never been anything but.

Roy cries, shook with something the opposite of death rattle. Nuzzles her thigh, closes his lips around the place she’s _throbbing._ Gives himself to her, as if he hasn’t already, as if she hasn’t always been his queen.

She spasms, then, her hand, her thighs the tenderest vises he’s ever felt, and even as enfolded as he is, he can hear her keening.

If he could do anything but stay still, let her ride out her shivers on his tongue, he would tell her that he loves her. Call her by her name, time and again, tone breathless and quivering fond but. It’ll keep.

And it does, until her hand pulses around his one last time, until her legs slacken, until his slick cheek lists against her knee.

She says it all back, dabs his face clean with her handkerchief, guides him on coltish knees back to her bed. Laughs, only very sweetly, when he asks her to pass him a change of pants.

Riza clutches him close that night, warm and steady and safe in the lull of her arms, her pulse.

Together, they make certain that she never has to let go.

**Author's Note:**

> filename: wife guy roy
> 
> title from dermot kennedy's 'power over me'
> 
> do let me know what you thought of this! it's been a while since i've watched or written fma, so i'm a little bit iffy on characterization, but i did my best!! your feedback is always appreciated, and you can come hang out with me on [twitter](https://twitter.com/bird_scribbles)if you like! i've mainly been a fire emblem account, but i've been branching out recently.
> 
> thank you so so much for reading! have a good one!


End file.
